The Cougar's Wish (Desert Guards) (27 page)

He sighed.

Hannah tugged his ear. “Try that one again,” she said to the gathering of weirdos in Sean’s cramped living room. If they spent much longer in that meeting, the folks at Glenda’s house would start looking for them. They were holding up dinner. “He’s not listening.”

“I’m listening,” Steven muttered. “I heard everything y’all said.”

“Then why didn’t you respond?” Belle asked, looking over her shoulder at him in that way she did that was half
hello, lover
and half
get off your ass, Welch
.

It was a reasonable question. He just didn’t know how to answer it.

“Ask it again,” he said.

Lola, seated on the other side of the coffee table, entwined her fingers atop her lap and let out a breath. “You felt spirits attacking you, but they never entered you. Could it be that they’re not able to?”

“Yeah, that’s what you asked, but I still don’t have an answer for you. I wouldn’t even know how to qualify that. I don’t know anything about this stuff. The folks in this room know way more about it than I do. All I know is that spooky things were there, that they wanted a piece of me, and that I’d like to not put myself in a situation where they could get that chunk they so desperately want.”

“But here’s the thing,” Claude said, and already, Steven didn’t like his tone. Steven knew that tone. It was the same one his commanding officers used when they were going to tell him some shit he didn’t want to hear and that would probably cause him a hell of a lot of aggravation he couldn’t avoid. “There are people who are proof to possession, just like there are people who are more sensitive to it.”

“And your point?”

“Simply that you may be one of the former. And if that’s the case, nothing coming out of that hellmouth or anything on the other side of the portal can do much more than knock you around a bit.”

“You’re talking about things that I can’t see taking swings at me.”

That wasn’t the kind of enemy Steven wanted. He preferred the ones with faces he could see and bodies he could destroy.

Claude turned his hands over. “That’s understandable. But you’re fortunate that Belle can see what you can’t or at least sense it.”

“Yeah, real fortunate.”

Belle looked over her shoulder again, and he suspected that if he’d been a Cougar, he might have been able to sense a bit of anger boiling off of her. Since, however, he was just a garden-variety jackass with no supernatural inclinations whatsoever besides an apparent drive to play hard to get with bogeymen, he had to rely on the senses he actually had.

She was pissed, judging by the tight set of her lips and the violent gnashing of her teeth.

He groaned. “Look, that’s all well and good, but what does any of that have to do with anything y’all need to do?”

“You read Jill’s letter,” Sean said. “Didn’t you?”

“Yeah, so?”

“And you heard what Dawn said?”

“Yep. Crystal clear. Still, what’s that got to do with the price of rice in China?”

Hannah leaned back against the sofa and gave the end of her braid a twist. “I see where this is going.”

“Care to share, little sister?”

“My dreams make sense now.”

“I don’t want to hear about your dreams. You dream about horror movie stuff, and it always comes true in one way or another.”

Hannah was precognitive, but most of her visions came to her at night when she needed to be resting, and they were almost always about threats to the Cougars. As the glaring’s avenger, the dreams were part and parcel of her job. She hated them, but she’d already saved Mason a lot of frustration by warning him in advance about trouble brewing in the glaring.

She shook her head. “Those dreams weren’t so bad. I couldn’t figure out what you had to do with the hellmouth—especially knowing how you felt about going into it the first time—and then I had another of them last night.”

“You expected that there wouldn’t be any more,” Belle said. A statement, not a question.

Hannah nodded.

“You tellin’ me I gotta go back in there?” Steven asked.

Whatever magic Belle had on him at that moment wasn’t enough to keep him from standing. He nudged her off his lap as gently as he could, but couldn’t get away.

Hannah yanked him back down and hissed, “Sit.”

He sat.

Belle didn’t reclaim her seat on his lap but, instead, sidled around the coffee table and plopped onto the sofa beside Lola. She glared at him.

“What’d I do to deserve that? I’m the one who’s getting yanked around here like some kind of puppet.”

“We just need you to listen,” Claude said.

“I’m listening. I simply don’t like the sounds of the words y’all are saying.”

Ellery glanced at her phone’s screen and cringed. “Mason’s looking for us. I was vague and told him we’d be over for dinner in ten minutes. We’re going to have to tell those folks at Glenda’s house what’s going on, so let’s figure out what information we need to disseminate now and know what our parts are in this mess before we bring anyone else into it.”

Steven groaned again. There was a reason she was the alpha’s mate, and it was easy to forget what she was when she was just being plain-old Ellery that he’d known for ten years. It was hard to see her as more than his little sister’s best friend, but Ellery was not only a powerful witch, she was a very
reasonable
woman.

He knew she wasn’t talking crazy, no matter how badly he wanted her to be.

He lifted the brim of his baseball cap, scraped his hair back from his face, and let out a long, ragged breath. “Recap.”

“We’ll go item by item down Jill’s letter.” She nodded to Belle, who pulled the thing from her pocket and smoothed it against the table.

“Jill said that when the Coyotes learned about the hellmouth on the day Edgar abducted Ellery, their alpha wanted to try to exploit it if he could. They hooked up with a couple of out-of-town witches to summon some things from the portal. They only got close enough to do it once and, in the process, lost two Coyotes. Jill’s mate and one other guy. Whatever they tried to let out killed them, and during that chaos, a couple of
Impostores
got out.”

Lola sighed. “We’ll probably find out which ones soon enough. Give them enough time to recover, and they’ll probably be back with some new trick to try to rebuild what they lost.”

“We’ll be ready for them,” Hannah said.

“Next,” Steven said. He wanted them to go ahead and rip the Band-Aid off, already.

“Well, the next parts concern Mason and Ellery or Hannah more than anyone, so I’ll skip them. Child custody stuff and threat detection info. Jill doesn’t really trust the Coyotes either. Her home pack was apparently a lot different from the one here.”

“Interesting. Next.”

Belle narrowed her eyes at him, and if gazes could be daggers, he would have been hamburger meat.

He shrugged. “I’m just trying to get to dinner, sugar.”

She ground her teeth and pulled in a deep breath through her nose, then let it out through her mouth, never taking her gaze from his. “The Sheehans ran their mouths a lot. While they were out trying to drum up support for their cause, or to at least find a glaring to take them in and protect them from Mason, they talked too much. So, there are shifter groups who are aware of the conflicts here. And while most wouldn’t threaten us because our business doesn’t concern them and theirs doesn’t concern us, there are some who would try to exploit the instability for their own personal gains.”

“In what way?”

“Some other alpha could come in, take over, and start collecting dues from every member of the glaring, for one thing. Some other alpha might not be so tolerant of the other shifter groups and supernatural entities in town, and keeping the peace may not be at the top of his agenda. Territory and power would be more important to him than harmony. An alpha like that would not only be bad for the glaring, but for the humans in town who live among us. Those that know about us don’t fear us, and we’d like to keep it that way.”

Steven leaned back against the sofa and closed his eyes tight. “Fuck.”

“So, you understand what’s required of you?”

“Yeah, I understand that y’all are up to your chins in hot shit, and somehow, I’m a part of it. You want me to go in and hunt down those
Impostores
or whatever, right? Find out what kind of mess they’re plotting?”

“That and other things. We all have our roles to play,” Lola said quietly. “Just because the hellmouth is being closed doesn’t mean we can’t still use the door. We need to, but we must be particular about who we send through it.”

Steven opened his eyes. It wasn’t just out of respect, but because it seemed impossible to not pay attention when the goddess was speaking. His body made him act right even if his brain was behind the curve.

“I chose to stay here all those decades ago because here, I could integrate into the kind of community I wanted to live in. For a long time, I was hands-off, as is required due to the noninterference rules we gods and goddesses abide by. I’m not leaving this place anytime soon, and I’d like my next sixty years here to be as kind to me as the first sixty. I’m not going to apologize for pulling strings and putting my chess pieces in place to protect what has become important to me.”

“You’re saying I’m one of those pawns,” Steven said.

“You wouldn’t be if I didn’t think you could play the game.”

“What if I don’t want to play the game?”

She massaged her palm with the opposite thumb and stared at some point over Steven’s head. “No sane person wants to play it,
mijo
.”

It was a hard truth, and no one said anything for a long while.

Phones were buzzing—probably folks looking for them for dinner—and people fidgeting, but nobody talked.

Nobody had anything to say.

“I often counsel my therapy patients to put their fears down on paper,” Lola said quietly after a minute of stillness. “Sometimes, it’ll make them seem smaller and easier to take apart. Also, if you write those things down along with the reasons you have to conquer them, you might feel more powerful. Logic may not always chase away anxiety on the first volley. You’ve got to keep bombarding it, weakening it one strike at a time. You may not feel as though you’re making any progress, but time has a funny way of showing us that we change, even if we can’t see it while it occurs.”

Obviously, the words were directed at Steven, but everyone seemed to be chewing on them. Even Belle, who was carefully rubbing down the creases of the letter with her brow furrowed.

What’s she afraid of?

He didn’t know too many people—male or female—as brave as Belle. Even in the Marines, he would have been hard pressed to come up with the names of folks who stepped so boldly into conflict the way the women in that Cougar glaring did. He used to be able to do that.

He couldn’t anymore.

Lola stood and stuffed her hands into the pockets of her long, colorful skirt. “I’ll go quell the masses,” she said. “I’m never late for a meal. If I’m there, they won’t look for you just yet, but don’t delay. Take a moment to strategize. The list of things you’ll need to do on the other side of the hellmouth will likely grow by the day and with more information that becomes available. Because of your particular skills, I believe the individuals coordinating the missions need to be people in this room, and I believe it is up to you to convince the others that having easy access to that realm is wise.”

She glided out the front door, and as she instructed, they all sat in their own thoughts for a moment.

Maybe the rest looked at each other and passed some nonverbal communication along, but if they did, Steven wasn’t a party to it. He stared at his feet and twiddled his thumbs. It was a typical
not me
posture, and he hoped like hell they could read it.

Hannah might have been on to something when she said that if the Fates were jerking him around that he should just hang on for the ride, but he’d never been fond of that kind of irony. The one person who
couldn’t
think clearly when around that portal volunteering to be some kind of hell ranger?

Nope. Not gonna happen
.

“I’m actually the least reckless of the four of us, thank you
very
much,” Belle spat at Mason.

Mom’s kitchen was crowded, and the energy level with so many Cougars, gods, witches, and angel types was just too high, and it was making Belle’s inner cat snarly. Well, that and other things. Steven, for one, who was standing at the far opposite of the room from her, white as a sheet and nervous as hell. She needed to do something about that, but at the same time, she wasn’t so sure he’d let her. First things first, though. She needed to get the alpha off her figurative back.

Mason narrowed his eyes at her and tipped his chair onto its back legs. With his arms crossed over his chest like that and his teeth grating, he should have looked forbidding, but to Belle, he was just the doofus she’d known since birth who’d been getting on her last nerve since puberty.

“You didn’t think maybe I should have been in attendance during your little search and rescue mission?” Mason asked. “I’m responsible for about half of you.”

“Actually, we’re the handful of people you
don’t
need to worry about,” Hannah said. “You can’t be everywhere at once, and every now and then, Hank is going to take some decisions away from you so you don’t get distracted from other things you need to be doing. Other times, I’m going to take some. The hellmouth issue fell into my jurisdiction last night.”

Mason looked to Ellery.

Ellery gave him a long blink.

“Weren’t you supposed to be at work last night?” he asked flatly.

“I took off. My supervisor is a witch. She knows I have to change my plans on the fly sometimes. Besides, Claude was there. He wasn’t going to let anything too traumatic happen to me.”

Mason looked to Claude who stared right back. “Do the math, Alpha. She’s my sister-in-law. Her sister would ensure a very painful existence for me if I had let things get out of hand. You haven’t seen hell until you’ve seen Gail angry.”